Matrox G400 TV a graphics and video Marvel

April 12, 2000
Web posted at: 1:38 PM EDT (1738 GMT)

By Rawn Shah
Special to CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- Matrox is one of the leading graphics card vendors for the consumer market. With its new Marvel G400 TV, they have combined the best of their 2D/3D graphics capabilities, with their best TV and video editing system.

This product competes with the likes of the ATI All-in-Wonder and the 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV. It's intended for those who want to hook up their TV to their computer and watch shows as well as edit and produce their own home movies. If you don't need the TV capabilities, then Matrox offers their Millennium G400 series which has the same graphics chip but with more on-board video memory and an even faster digital to analog video processor.

The product comes in two pieces, a graphics adapter card that goes into your computer's Accelerated Graphics Port slot, and an external box to connect all your video sources. You can still use the card without the external box but will not have any home video capabilities.

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The card can take advantage of dual and quad-speed AGP slots that multiply the speed of communications between the graphics subsystem, the processor, and main memory. The newer mid-range to high-end PCs on the market today feature dual-speed AGP. However, you can be sure that the prices will fall to bring the higher end into your affordable reach in the coming year.

Matrox provides driver software that allows you to use the Marvel on Windows 95, 98, and NT. Soon other platforms such as Windows 2000, and Linux will also be supported directly by Matrox. The standard box comes with the driver and installation software, some demo software, Avid Cinema video editing software, and a 3D game called Wild Metal Country.

It can support 3D resolution up to 2048 x 1536 pixels in 32-bit color, and 2D resolution up to the same resolution but at 24-bit color. If you have a 21" monitor, the best choice would be to set it to a lower 1600 x 1280 resolution at 32-bit color, and at a high vertical refresh rate of 100MHz. This should give the sharpest picture without taxing your monitor or your eyes.

Unlike its competitors, however, the Marvel can support one monitor and one TV connected at the same time. Both can be used to display your desktop. The TV can also be used to show DVD movies with their software DVD player, while still using the desktop on the monitor. This still does require your computer to have a DVD-ROM drive but does not need a separate MPEG card to process the DVD signal. You can also use the TV to watch antenna or cable television shows while you are using the PC.

If you don't have a separate TV to connect to the device, you can still watch your favorite sit-coms and movies on your computer monitor, using their PC-VCR Remote television tuner software. When you watch TV on your PC through the Marvel, it appears as a window on your desktop alongside a remote control. The window can be resized up to a full screen view by dragging the sides around. The TV tuner and remote control, aside from the regular functions such as brightness, contrasts, channel and volume buttons, also allows you to define all your channels, display closed caption text, record video to file, and take single frame snapshots of what you are watching.

The Marvel, like most ordinary TVs, cannot display more than a single channel at a time unlike the ATI All-in-Wonder card which does offer Picture-in-Picture viewing to see two channels at a time. Additionally most PC TV products do not come with a physical remote control, forcing you to actually do this on the PC. Thus you can't really run the TV and sit on a sofa away from the computer to watch.

The Marvel supports both the NTSC television signal system used in most of North America, and the PAL system used in Europe and many other parts of the world. Unless you are a globe-trotting adventurer who uses a wide range of equipment, it is most likely that your TV, VCR, camcorder or other video equipment are set for one of the systems only.

One warning about cable TV connections. I used a passive splitter (a small $3.00 device) that allows you to connect two different output cables from a single input cable. This allows me to send a direct signal to my TV and a second signal to the PC. However, if you use passive splitters, be prepared to notice a degradation of the signal. This does not occur on Digital TV signals for those lucky few who have such service. With the Marvel, it is better to feed the input cable directly into the external video connector box, and then hook up your TV to the box separately. The box is directly powered through the PC, and although it does internally split the signal, it does this through active splitting which does not suffer the loss in video signal quality.

If you have an older TV with only the coaxial screw-on connector, you might be out of luck since the video output from the connector box only offers newer RCA style video and audio connectors (similar to the ones you use for connecting audio equipment). You might be able to get a converter box from your local hardware or computer store.

The 3D graphics on the Marvel is leading edge. Although the crown for 3D graphics quality shifts every few months, the Matrox G400 is still considered one of the best ones around. To demonstrate the graphics quality, Matrox offers demo software and a 3D game called Wild Metal Country. The demo software allows you to fly around a nicely rendered scene of an old log house in the forest with a little magical fairy flying around. Although I did notice that some jagged lines when they should have been smooth (an effect called anti-aliasing), for the most part, the motion was flawless.

Their free game explored the full feel of hardware accelerated 3D graphics. Although not too complicated, Wild Metal Country shows how texture bump mapping can make hills look more realistic, with trilinear filtering giving smooth turns of the scene. For additional fun, I installed Quake 3 on the system. At full screen size of 1024x768 and 16bit graphics for Quake 3, the game was a fighting frenzy. Most gamers don't pay as much attention to the detail of the walls and environment in Quake 3, because they are more involved in dodging rockets and plasma coming their way. However, the environment is surprisingly detailed using many different graphics effects.

The Marvel also comes with Avid Cinema, a nice home video editing software package. Unlike the software with the iMac DV and the Sony Digital Studio PC, Avid Cinema offers complete advice from start to finish on how you may want to create your film. This includes what to record, how to take shots, what kind of editing effects to apply, how to add titles and how to publish it. In short, it offers the service of a film producer in the package.

Avid Cinema does not have the long list of transition and editing effects that you can do with Adobe Premiere on the Sony Digital Studio PC, but it does have more than that of Apple iMovie. It has separate tracks for video, audio, titles and music like that of Premiere, allowing you to manipulate each of these separately. Avid Cinema offers a balance between the professional environment of Premiere and the easy to use features of Apple iMovie and Sony DVGate.

This graphics card combines the best of several worlds: video editing, DVD playing, and 3D and 2D graphics. The external box makes it easier to connect other video devices without having to grasp and reach behind your computer. The ability to display to a separate TV than your monitor makes it possible to work with a video clip on a full screen level while still accessing your controls on the monitor, or you could work with twice the desktop space. Serious gamers will not be disappointed with the speed of the card when it comes to 3D graphics.

The Matrox Marvel G400-TV has a retail price of $299. If you are looking for a one-unit solution that can handle all aspects of a graphics card, this may be it.

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